[Guide] Malphite, The Rock Solid Behemoth -SmecssRaege-

[Guide] Malphite, The Rock Solid Behemoth -SmecssRaege-

MASTERY TREE/SUMMONER SKILLS/RUNE PAGES:
What i suggest here are exactly that, SUGGESTIONS, the metagame (aka the 3 things listed) are very much up to personal choice

Malphite, The Rock Solid Behemoth****NOTE: THIS IS A TANKING BUILD!!! Forgot to put that in the title :-( Part of me wants to try the melee malphite, but i love tank malphite so much that i'd have a hard time deviating away from it***

Skills:Q: Seismic Shard - Shoots a rock shard at targeted enemy, lowering their movespeed by 30% and giving it to you for 5 seconds (very good for keeping people in distance)
W: Brutal Strikes - Passive: Cleave on physical attack, Activate for increased damage for a short time
E: Ground Slam - Deals damage in a small AoE around yourself +70% of your total armor, on top of applying a 60% attack speed debuff for 4 seconds to all whom it hits
R: Unstoppable Force - Sprints towards the targeted area (with a small bit of travel time) dealing AoE damage and knocking any champions it hits into the air, which leads to a 1-2 second stun when they hit the ground

Passive: Creates a shield that absorbs 10% of your max HP, this shield takes 10 seconds of being out
of combat (aka Not getting hit at all) to regenerate itself. *Note: The shield WILL heal itself back to full if you have been out of combat for 10 seconds even if it had previously lost hp.*

SKILL BUILD:
1: Q (Use to potentially cause some harassing and if with a good aggressive lane mate this spell could lead to an early game kill...also good to survive...even level 1 is a shift of 60 MS in the chase)
2: E (Ground slam will be your bread and butter throughout the game, try to use it early game to rack up creep kills and if you get the chance to, put a harass on the enemy)
3: E
4: W (First level gives 30% cleave and 30% damage boost, useful for hitting backrow mobs once or twice and setting up a big wave kill with ground slam, useful if you get up to the towers as well)
5: E
6: R (Awesome ability that has three uses -A- To initiate a fight by charging into the ~enemy team taking the brunt of the initial burst and dropping a fast early ground slam ~-B- To be used as a good form of crowd control if you manage to initiate a fight without ~needing to rush in, you can save it for when you have 2-3-4 or in some circumstances ~all 5 heros within the aoe for a big time stun followed up with a nice ground slam ~debuff -C- Not the greatest use of it...but if you do get ganked or find yourself in a ~very unfavourable position you can use this to run the heck away, use it like you would ~flash, through terrain where possible.... I highly discourage blowing it on this ~cooldown...but if its that or dieing...by all means go ahead and try to survive with it )
7: E
8: Q
9: E (maxed out here)
10: Q
11: R
12: Q
13: Q (maxed out here)
14: W
15: W
16: R (maxed out here)
17: W
18: W (maxed out here)

Alternate Skill Build: For a less farming but more hero harassing build, switch around Q and E, will give you a lot more power to harass from a longer distance than ground slam can cover

Early Game(1-5): If you are with an ideal lanemate you can start thinking hero kills as early as level 2 or in some favorable cases even level 1, go for the hero kills where you can, slowing with seismec and landing a ground slam....without overextending and whilst not putting yourself in harms way...don't be afraid to blow flash and get a kill that way. Other than that, last hit where possible and if you see an oppurtunity to get a couple kills with ground slam use it, its a fairly low mana cost.
Mid Game(5-11): Somewhere in this bracket is where you should start making your presence very known if it hasn't been already. If you have chalice+warden's already you are already becoming a formidable tank even at such an early stage. Not to mention at level 7 it should only take 1 melee smack and a ground slam to take out the entire back row, so use this to your advantage for some good farming. If the possibility to gank or help another lane arises, take it, you are a great ganker with your ulti and the powerful 1-2 punch of seismec shard+ground slam. Again, use flash OFFENSIVELY in any case possible that you think will directly lead to a kill. Consider going for the golem buff>lizard buff> dragon kill if no other junglers are around, ask for help getting the golem buff if you need it, but dragon should go down extremely easily solo, although any nearby DPS'ers that want to stop in should be welcomed to.

Mid-Late Game(11-16): This pretty much plays out the same as mid game, except anytime your team pushes or does any group activity, you SHOULD be there, make your presence known all over the map and cause most enemys to play very defensively and cautiously by acting as an intimidator, just know when it's too much and don't get yourself baited into any traps :P
Late Game(16+): More or less the same still, except at this point you should be nearing your buildup to banshee's veil, and should basically be borderline invincible except to a PURE WHOLE TEAM focus fire...in which case, your team probably did something wrong if this happens :-P You are the tank at this point, be wary of this fact, and play the role, get up front, throw your slows around on the higher threat targets so your team can hopefully capatilize on it, keep groundslamming away and enjoy the ride =)

Lanemates/Partners:
People you want: Somebody who can snare, continual slow, stunners...basically people that can give time to do some work and go to town (as well as massively increasing the effectiveness of your slow and ulti) You also could prefer a good harasser, **Ranged is a big plus but not necessary**
Such As: Viegar, Ryze,Annie, Karthus, Anivia, Morgana,Tairic, Singed, Alistar Blitzcrank (to a certain extent, if he's good :P) Evelynn, Twitch, etc.
People you don't want: To be honest I don't really think there is horribly bad lane partners for malphite... basically any one that's low damage and bad lane control early on will be your worst matches as you want to be scoring kills pretty much from the get go. Examples of these would be along the lines of: Gangplank, Warwick, Dr. Mundo .. those are pretty much the only ideal hero's i can think of, even then laning with any of them would still work, just not very well until you could be the creep killer @ lvl 7 which is when both warwick and gangplank start to shape up into better hero killers anyways

How to approach battles:
You are the tank. Period. You get right into the fray, and try to make yourself as big of a target as possible. You can take hits for quite some time before you hit the dirt. Aside from that obvious fact, try to seismic shard anyone who is giving your squishy's problems that can't break it (even more so if they are melee) and drop ground slams all over the place for a nice output of damage, but try to center it around the physical dps'ers as you will be taking off a huge portion of their damage with ground slam + frozen heart (85% reduction) Use your ulti as previously described in the skill build section under -A- and -B- and you should be laughing your way to victory if the team behind you is competent. Just keep putting spells out, and once you have the spare mana to support it just start popping brutal strikes when you can for some added DPS

Final Note: I do love malphite and while he may not be the *best* tank as far as his damage negating *abilities* go....he is still great in the fact that his ulti is one of, IF NOT THE SINGLE! best initiator skills in the game, and leaves you in great position to ground slam...which basically co-exists as your main source of damage and your tanking ability against melee's. Against caster's...you just wether the storm and hope your team picks them off for you, not to say you can't take many of them down by yourself :P

Additional Credits To:
Bezier for answering my passive shield question
ChronicleX for asking the question originally
Coronach for giving an official answer on it, so we know it's not just heresay

Extremely thorough guide, very well done. I have been running through all the tanks sticking primarily with Rammus due to his shielding ability as a pure tank. I have yet to try Malphite but when I get home from work this morning I will give this guide a shot.

I'll have to look up more of your guides if they are as well written as this.

Extremely thorough guide, very well done. I have been running through all the tanks sticking primarily with Rammus due to his shielding ability as a pure tank. I have yet to try Malphite but when I get home from work this morning I will give this guide a shot.

I'll have to look up more of your guides if they are as well written as this.

Indeed they are...i put A LOT of time into writing each guide....

On average (now that i have all the formatting done) just to do all the text work and making sure all the prices and info are right etc. usually takes me about 1 1/2 hours from the time i open the post and copy/paste an old guide in, and then just replace the text

the original (morgana) took 3 hours with my formatting decisions and constant edits (and has since been edited like 10 times lol)

I find malaphite's laning quite lacking compared to his jungling ability. His slow/nuke starts off at way too low a percentage to give real lane presence, along with a lack of mana. Conversely, if you start with golem buff, he can rip through the jungle extremely quickly, and ganks fairly well at level 6. I use a completely different item build accordingly, and would not rush warden's mail under any circumstances, but its hard to judge having laned him an entire 1 game. Formatting is good.

I find malaphite's laning quite lacking compared to his jungling ability. His slow/nuke starts off at way too low a percentage to give real lane presence, along with a lack of mana. Conversely, if you start with golem buff, he can rip through the jungle extremely quickly, and ganks fairly well at level 6. I use a completely different item build accordingly, and would not rush warden's mail under any circumstances, but its hard to judge having laned him an entire 1 game. Formatting is good.

yeah well theres already a full jungle guide.... and beleive me....my scores reflect the fact that malphite can lane perfectly fine

my AVERAGE k:d is usually something like 8:1 on malphite, usually ending the game around something like

12-18 kills
1-2 deaths
equalish amount of assists

does he jungle good? yes....but he can also lane extremely well done properly and aggresively enough with an equally agressive lanemate

He can lane "fine" as can every single hero in this game, it doesnt mean however that he adds much to a lane or can effectively stop the opponents from farming. I can't really think of many heroes with less lane presence except maybe mundo/warwick/low level GP/low level yi. Its good to have a newer non-jungle guide I suppose, but Mal has possibly the fastest jungling times in the game, while providing an amazing ultimate that makes warwick's look silly.

Also, your build spends somewhere in the vicinity for 5-6k gold without adding a single point of HP. I have no idea how you play against competent teams and average 6:1 or better K/D ratios with 0 magic resist or HP until past 20 minutes into the game. Maybe you make Ch33sy and reginalid look like poor players so any build works, but I would definitely find a way to incorporate some hp into that build to live through the initial spell burst and take advantage of his passive (I personally start with 2 Hearts of Gold in a jungle build).

I tried this out twice with mixed results. I decided to modify some of the items a little bit depending on the situation, as I wasn't playing very caster-heavy teams. I got Thornmail (3 kills in one game from someone hitting me, never thought it'd work), Tabi Boots, Frozen Heart, Sunfire Cape, and Atma's. I didn't have time to go much farther past that as we were creaming the other team. I had a Chalice at one point, but I sold it at the end of the game to buy my Atma's.

I think Frozen Heart is such a core item, that extra mana + cooldown reduction is amazing. My runes for non-ap characters is usually 50% crit dmg 8.1% cooldowns at 18, so that really worked well with him. I didn't mess with my masteries yet, I might make him tanky and see what that does.

If I were going to get an item past Atma's, it would've been Frozen Mallet hands down.

(Unsure if the shield is capable of effectively "healing" itself by being out of combat after 10 seconds if it had already taken damage)

Here's a Riot response to that question, the answer isn't exactly clear but I take it to imply that yes, 10 seconds after you are last hit the shield recharges to full (whether it was destroyed or not).

Here's a Riot response to that question, the answer isn't exactly clear but I take it to imply that yes, 10 seconds after you are last hit the shield recharges to full (whether it was destroyed or not).

very cool, thanks for the information :-) will update OP with credits to you

Quote:

Originally Posted by Merovinge

He can lane "fine" as can every single hero in this game, it doesnt mean however that he adds much to a lane or can effectively stop the opponents from farming. I can't really think of many heroes with less lane presence except maybe mundo/warwick/low level GP/low level yi. Its good to have a newer non-jungle guide I suppose, but Mal has possibly the fastest jungling times in the game, while providing an amazing ultimate that makes warwick's look silly.

Also, your build spends somewhere in the vicinity for 5-6k gold without adding a single point of HP. I have no idea how you play against competent teams and average 6:1 or better K/D ratios with 0 magic resist or HP until past 20 minutes into the game. Maybe you make Ch33sy and reginalid look like poor players so any build works, but I would definitely find a way to incorporate some hp into that build to live through the initial spell burst and take advantage of his passive (I personally start with 2 Hearts of Gold in a jungle build).

The reason i can do it is because a my rune page is more or less HP stacked w/ the last 6% i need for cooldowns. And as to why i can have "no" hp and still love for extreme amounts of time is because at the point of the game thats pre-banshee's veil....i absolutely DESTROY casters (ryze being about the only one excluded, but i have fast enough reflexes to always flash away from his ulti as i listen for that crackling sound rather than the spell animation itself) And i dont have "no" magic resist, my FIRST item is chalice of harmony which is +40 MR and building into tabi + wardens + frozen heart nets me +235 armor.... and what melee is really going to kill me then.... we are talking only 5,000 gold into the game...and im already sitting at 300 armor. And since thats more than enough to tank any melee for a long time to come, next item comes by is banshees veil....now at 300 armor, 100 MR 7500gold in.... you are borderline unkillable unless under EXTREME focus fire...i have friends that can attest to the solid tankability of this... once i pick up the 7500 gold worth, i can usually literally tank a whole team for a solid 10-15 seconds or so, before biting it....and in 10-15 seconds....they are already usually running for the hills (after ulti + 3 ground slams for 450 a piece)....

It's a popular misconception that tanks need to stack hp....you really REALLY DONT. not to mention on malph, if you go with an early wardens thanks to the armor...i think at lvl 7...you 1 shot backrow creeps (if not, 1 shot with melee and brutal strikes cleaves net you the 3 kills) so you is a decent pusher / anti-pusher as he can just decimate a whole wave in 1 shot.

But at the same time, you are correct in saying that "no hp is wasting his passive" .... is it really though?

Maybe my shield is only 180hp.... but its 180hp with 300 armor and 100 MR on it which is effectively counted as 520hp vs. physical and 360hp vs magic. So yes...even that is good (Assuming you know that 1 armor/MR = to adding 1% life to your "effective" total HP to a given damage source)